Thanks for the help I got my USB HDD to be listed and accessable via my windows pc. the problem I'm encountering now is that the write speed to the hdd is only ~2mbytes/s . I wonder if there is way to fix this, this cannot be the maximum speed of the disk, something must be restricting or slowing down the transfer rate? thanks in advance.

@markyh444 There have been one or two occasions I thought I might be able to save a hard working developer/mod a couple of minutes, but I'm way too nervous to do it!! Believe me, plenty of play and learning to do yet;))